Bob Hope traveled more than 9 million air miles around the world for the USO. He hit the movie "Road" to locales as exotic as Zanzibar and Bali. He had lavish homes in Toluca Lake, Calif., outside North Hollywood, and in Rancho Mirage, Calif., near Palm Springs. The most American of comedians, he was born in England.

But he always called Cleveland his hometown.

"No matter how much I travel or how far I go, Cleveland is with me," he said. "So I've never left home."

Hope died Sunday night in Louca Lake, Calif. He was 100.

His last trip home came in July 1996, when he served as grand marshal of the Parade of Lights on the Cuyahoga River during the city's bicentennial celebration. Characteristically, he used it as a chance to visit nieces and nephews and to get in some golf - much as he did on his second-to-last visit, for the final Indians game at Cleveland Municipal Stadium in October 1993, when he also took a sentimental journey to some old haunts.

One was the house he bought for his mother in Cleveland Heights, in the 3300 block of Yorkshire Road.

Other places, he found, had become only memories.

"My family and I lived in four houses near East 105th Street near Euclid," he said. "I went out and there was nothing there. The houses were gone, cleared away by the Cleveland Clinic."

Though his visits home had become less frequent, Hope never lost his feeling for Cleveland.

A TV publicist, Terri Corigliano, remembered him interrupting a national publicity swing to give her an impromptu tour of the city in 1982, pointing out places where he had lived, worked, played and performed.

"He wanted a special kind of soft-serve ice cream, and we got in a car and actually went roaming the streets looking for the place he remembered that served it," she said.

"He couldn't really find it, but he settled for a cone. We went to Higbee's and then he wanted to drive out to the old ballpark."

His father, William Henry Hope, was a stonemason who had immigrated to America in 1906, joining two brothers, Fred and Frank, already in Cleveland.

Leslie Townes Hope (later changed to Bob) was 4 when he arrived in Cleveland by train at the Erie Station in March 1908 with his mother, Avis Townes Hope, and six brothers. The family first moved in with his Uncle Frank, a plumber, and Aunt Louisa, who had urged them to come here, and then found a succession of ever-larger East Side homes to accommodate his parents, brothers and the roomers who supplemented his father's income.

"The first place we lived by ourselves was Standiforth Court," Hope said. "We were always on the move. We lived at 2029 Euclid. After that we moved behind the Cleveland Express barns. They weren't trolley barns. Express in those days meant Adam's Express or Wells Fargo vans, and horses to pull them. It was a long walk between the barns and our house. And if we got home after dark, it was scary."

He and his brothers helped the family and earned spending money through a staggering array of odd jobs. Among Hope's first were delivering The Plain Dealer and selling newspapers at East 102nd Street and Euclid Avenue.

"Three of my brothers had stands on the other corners," he said. "I had the Southwest Grocery Store corner, Jack had the Cleveland Trust Co. corner, Sid had the Marshall Drug Store corner, Fred the Standard Drug Store corner."

Advice from a customer

"I had one regular customer whose name I didn't know," Hope recalled. "All I knew was that he snapped his face open and shut like a wrinkled old coin purse. Not that he talked often."

One night - after Hope had to hot foot it to a nearby grocery to make change for the dime the customer paid for a 2-cent paper - the man did talk.

"I'm going to give you some advice," he said. "If you want to be a success in business, trust nobody. Never give credit and always keep change on hand. That way you won't miss any customers while you're going for it."

The man, a streetcar inspector told Hope, was the world's wealthiest, John D. Rockefeller. Hope said he often wished he had taken his advice.

In fact, he would amass his own fortune - not only from show business but by joining pal Bing Crosby in oil investments that Hope later converted into 5,000 acres of prime real estate in the San Fernando Valley and Ventura County, north of Los Angeles. He donated 1,200 acres of the latter to the public as wilderness area and was wealthy enough to own his own jet with his ski-nose caricature on the tail.

It was a long way from the adolescent years when he sometimes sang to pay his streetcar fare.

During his years in Cleveland public schools, Hope was remembered as the one boy who could sing soprano in the chorus without losing standing among the guys - even if "Hope-less" was his first nickname, a play on his given name of Leslie Hope.

"It's amazing how guts can replace talent," he joked decades later, saying his willingness to accept any challenge with humor had played a role in his rise to stardom.

Hope stood up against the bullies in the Doan's Corners neighborhood around East 105th Street and kidded his way into becoming mascot of its semipro football team. Too light to play football himself, though he reached 5-feet-11 and 170 pounds in his prime, he went out for track at East High as a sprinter. He liked to say he ran the 100-yard dash in two flat - feet.

He would hang around Charley Marotta's Athletic Club on East 79th Street to watch the fighters, and before long, accepted a dare to put on the gloves. Cocky, and not satisfied with boxing at club shows as Packy East - the "tough-sounding" name he hoped would bring glory to East High - he entered the Ohio Novice Championships.

In the semifinals, he recalled, "I drew a guy by the name of Happy Walsh. They called him Happy because every time you hit him, he smiled. Nothing bothered this fellow - fists, knives, guns, nothing. He looked as if he even had muscles in his hair. We fought at Moose Hall. I gave Happy my Sunday punch. He smiled. Then everything turned black."

An indifferent student, Hope said he kept the truant officer busy and joked that he wrote so many test answers on his sleeve, "my shirt graduated two years before I did."

He was busier working, developing his interest in performing and looking for fun - especially if it was free. He joined the knothole gang watching Tris Speaker and Napoleon Lajoie play for the Indians at League Park, bootlegged his way into Western Reserve University or Case Institute of Technology football games, went swimming in Lake Erie and went ice skating in Wade Park.

Hope would end up with part ownership of the Indians, which he bought when Bill Veeck acquired the team in 1946, and kept it out of "sentimental interest" for more than four decades - longer than he held the 11 percent interest he purchased the same year in the Los Angeles Rams, when pal Dan Reeves moved the team from Cleveland.

Hope had a golf tournament named for him and played exclusive courses such as Acacia and the Pepper Pike Club during later visits home, but he said he learned the game as a caddie and first played it in 1927 at Cleveland's Highland Park Golf Course.

Rising star

That was three years, by his reckoning, after he left town for the vaudeville circuit, but he came back to Cleveland for regular visits with his family. He was a rising star when he returned to play the Palace Theatre in the early 1930s, and a group of neighborhood pals came to watch.

"I should have known that something would happen because they didn't ask me for passes," he said. He was right - when he walked out on stage, they all pulled out newspapers and conspicuously read them through his act.

That was about the time he bought a house for his mother in Cleveland Heights, on the 3300 block of Yorkshire Road. He spent Christmas 1933 at the house. Avis Hope died less than a month later.

Hope was a certified star of Broadway, radio and the movies when he returned for a homecoming at the Palace Theatre in 1940, playing to a record week of packed houses.

"I think," he said, "it's the first time my family recognized that I had talent."

Critics said he bombed in a 1958 appearance at Cain Park in Cleveland Heights, and Hope was absent from local stages for years afterward. But he became the top attraction at the Ohio State Fair from the mid-1960s into the '80s and returned to Cleveland for its 175th anniversary celebration in 1971, leading a parade and performing for a Stadium crowd of 20,000. He was back for a USO fund-raiser in 1974, played the Front Row in 1975 and returned in 1976 for a GOP benefit and to accept an honorary doctorate and speak at John Carroll University's commencement.

Key to the city

Mayor Ralph J. Perk gave him the key to the city in 1973. "I found out later that Cleveland locks from the inside," Hope quipped.

That was just about the time that a proposal to rename East 12th Street. as Bob Hope Boulevard fell to opposition. Hope issued no opinion. But when Burbank, Calif., renamed the street in front of NBC Bob Hope Drive, he said, "It's an honor to have a street named after me - especially since all the oceans were taken."

Hope appeared in TV commercials for Sun Newspapers, proclaiming that the weeklies kept people informed "in my hometown."

He did not return in September 1983 for ceremonies re-dedicating the renovated Lorain-Carnegie Bridge as the Hope Memorial Bridge, in honor of Hope's father and other stonemasons who carved its massive stone pylons and eight "Guardians of Traffic" figures.

He seemed more impressed, a year earlier, when he made a reverential visit to the Church of the Covenant on Euclid Avenue. Working on it was his father's first job in Cleveland and, Hope said, the family used to walk to it on Sundays.

"We changed from Episcopalian to Presbyterian because we liked the church so much," he said. "Every time I'm in Cleveland, I drive past it and take a peek at it. This is the first time I've been inside it since I left to go on the road in 1924. It's awfully great, I'll tell you that. A masterpiece. This will be around a long time after I'm gone."